


wake up sensible heart

by bladeCleaner



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alpha Universe, Friendship is the best disease, Gen, Ladystuck 2012, The Furthest Ring likes keeping their servants occupied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-28
Updated: 2012-12-28
Packaged: 2017-11-22 17:34:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/612422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bladeCleaner/pseuds/bladeCleaner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Writing a legacy into existence. She, Rose: Darkness, stars, ink and paper under fingers; to be born, but not with an immunity to this disease called friendship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. sleeping sickness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bay/gifts).



She opens her eyes. She blinks, slowly realizing she's flat on her back. The sky is tuned to a dead channel, mimicking static with erratic flickering. A monochrome scheme permeates the area, grimy and dark wherever she looks.

She gets up, uncertain. 

The only thing that seems real is the river in front of her. It’s an ebony ribbon, curling and roiling within itself. She thinks of oil slicking and sloshing around in rainbow-slicked puddles, of poison and choking black gunk. She picks herself up from the grey grass and walks along the bank. She looks down at herself. She is almost completely devoid of colour, almost translucent and slightly tinged with brown as opposed to her usual tan skin. Curiously enough, her hands are trembling. She balls them into fists and keeps going, going, going…

(She is not afraid. She is never, ever afraid. She is more than her weakness.)

As she descends further into the horizon, the world darkens.

She reaches the end of the river. There is nothing but endless black forest. Uncertain, she lingers by the bank. Her bare feet touches a drop of the contaminated liquid.

Abruptly, brackish water rises up in the back of her mouth and she’s seized by an uncontrollable urge to vomit. Eyes watering, she can feel her blood pumping through her throat, veins ready to pop, she is choking, coughing, the world twisting under into her throat to force her on her knees-

 

_Grnythl blolrgfth shgt._

**sheisyoungveryyoungyesgood**

wouldyouliketoJOINUSSISTERCLAIMYOURRANKSAMONGSTUS

The land has disappeared into a chasm of emptiness. She is tiny and insignificant now, a small nothingness in all of this consciousness she can feel, a small bit of colour in all this void. Millions of tentacles and shifting horrors surround and curl around her, reaching into her brain. They whisper: _joinusjoinusjoinusjoinus_

She is eleven and she has loved the black magics all of her life. She nods.

 

_Borgl fuslyth vsulk aswevk_

**YOURPLACEISwithuswithuswithus**

TELLHEROFTHEmonstertheDEMONCHERUBSexployithisweaknessSHOWHERTHEABBERATIONSHOWHERTHERABBERATION

They press to her cheek and she knows then how the first apple must have tasted to Eve.

\--

She has always been restless. She lives for the incessant breeze of midnight’s howl and she learns the name of every constellation beyond her outstretched hands.

She fills herself with darknesses she learns how to harvest in time. Her void is the twilight’s call in the form of an endless summer’s breath and the space between stars. She cherishes every bit of her time in the moonlight, grass surrounding her for miles. She reads the grimoire extensively, as well as endless books about wizards. 

She dreams endlessly; in snatches from the mind of a girl who flickers like a candle flame within her. She sits on the roof watching the stars shimmer and spit in her vision. Oglogoth favours her; she does not what it means for her yet, except that what she dreams has some scent of memory or truth in it.

Appropriately, her house is a white monolith; a testament to coldness and minimalism. She flickers between rooms in search of sunlight and warmth, as if a moth. Her parents are hardly home; both greatly scientific and successful in their endeavours. When asked on the question of her education, her mother replies that she is schooling herself. The statement itself seems to be bragging; _my kid is so smart, she can teach herself!_

For any other ordinary child, this would have been improbable if not impossible. But not for Rose. She was given the internet, and a huge library to access, from the beginning of her birth. Sifting through articles and signing up on websites with courses, exercises and endless articles about the world. Favouring Lovecraft, her vocabulary rivalled her elders’ by the time she was twelve. When her parents come home from business trips and test her repeatedly, they are suitably impressed, if not a little too proud.

Sometimes, she dreams about text messages on a computer. The words, red blue green, comfort her. They come at night, settling over her vision like a fine dust, as she watches the stars. When she finally gets Pesterchum, she waits for a message from one of the handles for hours and hours. Nothing comes.

\--

She is thirteen when they show her what happens to humanity. That night, she is thankful her parents are hardly home. She runs from her bed and onto the roof and screams, screams, screams at the stars until she can taste blood. She shrieks still, until her throat is unbearably raw. She holds up the wands they provided her (skull-headed and black as india ink)and nearly sets the forest on fire, sending purpleblack arcs of crackling energy just above the treeline.

She cannot blot out the image of bodies upturned to face the dreary summer sky, floating like dead fish in the ruins of a flooded civilisation. Worse still are the tortures, the attempted blood casting experiments and secret cullings.

She sinks to her knees. For some reason clear liquid leaks from her eyes. She touches her fingers to her face reverently, shocked and agonized.

She does not sleep for months after.

It all comes to a head when her parents find her passed out, unconscious, on the bathroom floor.

When she awakes from her coma in the hospital, she hears hushed voices, the words ‘neglect’, ‘abandonment’ and ‘bad parenting’ sticking in her mind. She’s forced to take therapy and learns they are moving to their second house in Portland, Oregon.

“Do tell, what am I going to be doing there? Investigating the many ghost sightings, perhaps?” she suggests, acidly, when she is delivered the news.

Her father coughs, while her mother’s uncertain expression hardens into a plastic-mold smile.

“Sweetie, no! You’ll attend a nice middle school there, and meet kids your own age. Won't that be nice?” she replies in a saccharine voice. Rose inwardly scoffs. She wouldn't have tolerated this behaviour at six, let alone fourteen.

“A change of scenery could potentially be more disruptive to my mental health than helpful towards my recovery.”

They both look lost.

She sighs. 

“…what is Oregon like?”

Her mother chews on this question for a bit, before perking up.

“Oh, I hear they have some delightful mountains over there. What was it again, Hal?”

Rose bites her lip before she queries how mountains can be delightful.

“I think they called them the Cascade mountains?”

\--

Middle school through university, is of course, hell. She gets called witch, bitch, occultist, goth, emo, crazy, weird, every black name under the moon. The few times the bullying escalates to fake turds in her bagpack, homework scattered all over the bathroom floor, wet and ink-stained, the perpetrators always manage to find themselves having bad dreams. The kind that blindsides you out of bullying any further because you’re too afraid the threats whispered in them will become real. They all back off after that, still whispering ‘ice queen’ and ‘cold bitch’ under their breaths.

She gets excellent grades and only rarely skips school. Seeing her sleep again, her parents declare the move a success, if only wary of the fact that she doesn’t seem like teenagers her age; she takes up no interest in having pals or a boyfriend. They reason that she is a straight-A student, like the rest of the family, and applaud her rational decisions.

She looks at her peers and thinks that there is no point in having friends, if they are all going to die. What she has is better, anyway.

In her dreams, in between the ravaging savage with the red cheeks and the poor sister with the green spirals, in between watching the Condesce dangle humans from rafters and laughing, she visits the echoes of two beautiful boys, a vivacious girl and twelve alien trolls; she orbits them like a moon. All of them haunt her when she is awake, but it iis them, the first three she drifts back to like gravity, when the nightmares have become too much. They are what motivate her to keep going. She knows that she will see them again, just as she knows at least one of them will die with her.

The time she does not spend studying is scribbling away in her diaries, lavender pen scritch-scratching on paper. She is writing every detail of her dreams down in exactness, her visions becoming clearer, the pieces coming together as she observes Caliborn and Calliope. Soon, her life is consumed in the documentation of her dreams. Conjuring words and ordering them into something miraculously other, a story, a tale-this is the work she loves. It makes her feel more real, somehow. As if she belonged in some small way, instead of being a misfit of reality. They make her bones feel heavier, her heart pump faster, as if she is genuinely meant to be here, alive.

\--

The idea of finishing a novel and publishing said novel occurs to her slowly and eventually. It comes to her in bits and pieces, when she hears the roar of a crowd at her first political rally, decoding the few forums she finds on the internet about Betty Crocker’s slow but sinister motives and studying the effects of 1984.

Dressing it all up in wizardry, magic and murder is merely a bonus; a magician’s trick of misdirection to keep the audience off the scent. But not the Batterwitch’s. No, she intends to make her sweat.

She’s seen the end of this game and this is almost all she can do, to spite the Baroness, to bury her name into the Empress’ thinkpan like a bomb she’s not sure will explode.

The words are already there, humming underneath her fingertips. She takes all her diaries and gets to work, combining her wizard fanfiction with Calliope and Caliborn’s upbringing. Zazzerpan, Calmasis, Frigglish and all eleven of the Dreaded Disciples are born. There is satisfaction in the guise only an artist can feel.

She tells her parents of her plans to move near New York and publish her novel shortly after graduation. Her college roommate’s friend, Becka, who majored in Theatre, has offered to share the apartment’s rent with her.

“Is that a logical career choice, Rose?” her father asks coldly, over Thanksgiving dinner.

She twists her mouth into a docile smile, eyes twinkling.

“No, it isn’t. But neither was your elopement, I should think.”

After some heated arguments, some negotiations and a thankfully soft-hearted mother’s intervention, she moves out before the New Year starts. She’s already begun to see the stirrings of Betty Crocker developing Crockercorp technology; moving fast is a priority.

When she arrives with her bags, the city lies before her in lit zigzags, neon signs and arrows pointing to entertainment, freedom, hope. She closes her eyes, tucked in an alcove somewhere outside Grand Central, and sees the whole place dark as the underside of the ocean’s belly, and as waterlogged. Becka comes up next to her with a lightning smile and two cups of coffee, interrupting her vision with the scent of espresso, as if not all hope was lost.


	2. feed the soul

Becka gets used to you slamming the door every time you come home from work. You’ve snagged a job as an intern at a literary agency, if only to try and build contacts for your novel. You know the process as well as any other aspiring writer in New York: write cover letters, send out to publishing agents, proofread, edit, proofread, edit. In the meantime, try and get into the publishing world and see how it works. You are an amateur, they all tell you on your first day, and you would be encouraged to try and keep up. They stack you with overtime.

The first month during this tedious period, Becka, whom you know only a little, tries persuading you to go out with her. She doesn’t seem to get the hint about door slams: The express action meaning _I would like some solitude_. She knocks on your door when you’re writing, or conversing with the horrorterrors, interrupting your visions. You decline politely. You only ever slip out of your room to go to work, or to get food. You note that she leaves traces of herself every which way. There’s bacon grease in the pan, letters addressed to her all over the counter, lollipops scattered near the couch and lipstick on the coffee table. Idly, on a dull Tuesday, you pick an envelope up from the counter.

 

_oh._

That very same evening you leave the laptop off. You exit, see Becka lounging on the couch, watching the tube and slurping ramen. She looks over at the sound and spots you. Instead of starting or ignoring you, she smiles like you’ve always come out of your room at night.

“Hey, stranger,” she calls. You internally shrug. No one said she wasn’t going to notice you were a little misanthropic.

Your eyes snap to the television and you raise an eyebrow at her.

“Is that…is that _Glee_?” you ask, voice derisive and verging on laughter.

She tosses a pillow at you, which you easily dodge. “Hey, don’t you judge me!”

You smirk at her until she sighs and says, “Look, we all have our guilty pleasures. I’m not going to defend it, it's ridiculous and it's got sloppy writing, but I like the songs.”

You sit next to her on the couch. “By all means, do go on. It already sounds fascinating.”

She snorts. “Right, like I’m going to explain my psyche to you. If we're doing explanations, why the sudden interest in the outside world, Batman?”

The following silence is so impenetrable it couldn’t be cut with a knife. You fumble for a valid gambit. You settle for humour.

You sigh melodramatically. “Four for you, Miss Becka. Your torrid line of investigation has blown my cover. I am in secret a sanguinary vampire whose appetite is most insatiable. There are more than a few literal skeletons in my closet, I’m afraid. I’ve run out of blood and have come out to hunt…even now I restrain myself from feasting upon your undoubtedly delicious innards.”

A beat.

She laughs. “Said Edward Cullen to Bella Swan. Jesus, you've got a sick sense of humour, I'll give you that. And-oh my God, you’re not into Twilight, are you? Because then I totally reserve the right to judge you.”

You both trade sarcastic remarks well into season two of her Glee marathon. You develop, quite against your will, a fondness for Sue Sylvester and Quinn Fabray. 

__

Work continues to be the bane of your universe. You learn more about fonts, quality of paper, copyrights, sentence and story structure and formatting then you ever thought was possible. You work hard, buy big boxes of bandages for paper cuts and your pay is horrible. 

What prevents you the luxury of killing yourself is Becka’s meandering habits. On weekends, when you just want to sleep forever, she drags you out into Saturday sunlight to have a coffee, or check out a book sale, or smash plates at New York’s version of the Smash Shack: Plate Pummeler. On Sunday mornings when you have a severe hangover from drinking straight vodka, she combs your hair. You meet the rest of her friends on occasion; some of them are downright peacocks and sharks in a small pond, studded lips and wild hair whereas the rest from her job as an usher off-off-Broadway are quieter, starker, elegant in black. Some of them are dorky, goofy pals from college-you think you've seen them in class before, but you never really talked to anyone back then. She adopts a different version of herself for each clique and you think that it's no wonder she wants to be an actress-she slips through personalities like a fish through reeds and seaweed. 

What she was doing to you was as unsubtle as it was brilliant, and you were falling for it. One morning, watching hundreds of people pass by the glass window of Second Stop, you look back at her. She’s half shadow and half dappled sunlight, sipping a dark mocha. It almost seems like you’ve always sat a table from the door, close enough to the counter to hear the grinding of coffee beans and the muffled orders of customers. You’ve always been on first name terms with Pamela, your server from Plate Pummeler. You’ve always watched the television on mute and made up your own dialogue with her. You've always only ever rooted for the only lesbian couple on Glee.

She was grinding down what little resolve you had to stay friendless with only ghosts of the people you love(d?) and worse still, she was succeeding.

\--

One Tuesday night, you dream.

The atmosphere is different from your visions. The entire place seems nebulous and obscured with fog, like a thick swamp from a horror movie. In the distance, you see a silhouette that looks like a corpse.

You rush over and turn the body as you get handfuls of what looks like teal and red paint.

“Are you alright?” you ask, when you check for breathing. She looks like someone you know, all ashen skin, sunglasses and pointy horns. Her glasses are the wrong shape, though, and her lips a weird shade of plum-black. (Terecita. No, no…her name was Terezi? One of the twelve trolls you put in CoTL. She dies of being hanged.)

She yanks your collar down to look at her, crimson and teal still dribbling down her chin. She’s holding a cane-sword to the side of your neck. You’re caught in a spider-guillotine grin, sticky and sharp.

She lets go of you and walks backwards slowly, pressing the sword’s length perpendicular to her throat. She smiles. Her sunglasses flicker black for a second.

“Have you forgotten your purpose, Lalonde? Playing house with this girl…need we remind you are the servant of the Furthest Ring?” she snarls the last question while still grinning. It’s a repulsive sight. Her entire being turns black for a second.

Your mouth goes cotton-dry.

“She…isn’t interfering. I don’t see how it is a problem.”

She creaks bones into a symphony of horrific laughter. It sounds neither friendly nor dismissive. You recognize their language being tapped out through her jaw’s clicking: _You are to be one of us. She? She is NOTHING. She is less than nothing. If she was nothing she would be of value to us. Your heart belongs to us, Seer, and **only us**._

The wisp of the girl-the, the, your brother, the girl with the sword, shifting constantly-starts to blink, static clicking into place. You suspect if you ran your hand through its abdomen it would hardly do anything but displace pixels.

S/h/ze slices her throat open in a crimson arc.

\--

You don’t come out of your room for weeks. She assumes a family member of yours has died. This concept dies after your mother calls on the landline.

Halfway into January, she knocks once and then opens the door into your room, where you are lying on your bed after a particularly intense session with Oglogoth.

“Rose, come on.”

“I said no.”

“Rose, please come out.”

“No.”

“Rose, you can’t stay in here forever. You're being stupid.”

"You can't hide away like this."

“Is that what your parents told you when you were committed?”

Her head snaps back like she’s been slapped. You’re too far gone now. You’ve done a lot of thinking over the last few weeks. Moving away would make her chase after you, demanding an explanation; you have to hurt her to get her to go away.

“You left obvious clues. Messages from your therapist on the phone, badly hidden medication and letters from fellow patients, reckless behaviour and vagueness whenever I asked you where you went before college. Woodbridge, was that where you shut yourself up? Did they drag you out with that touching speech? Forgive me if I don’t wish to become your clone.”

The words are heaving themselves from your chest like bile and you say them a little too viciously, with intense pleasure; you’re not sure who is really talking, but it’s too late to think about it now.

From across the room, her eyes transmute to a wildness you haven’t seen before. You would be scared, you think, if you weren’t so dangerous yourself. She strides up to you and you tense for the slap, not bothering to block her.

Instead, you hear her footsteps fall on the floor and a door slamming behind her.

You get up, the only person in the dark apartment.

The eldritch monsters whisper to you, _she was unnecessary. You are a burning heart. We will make you beautiful, untouchable, silver._

Power flows through your hands. You haven’t used magic in a while, but infinity stretches through your arms in dark tendrils. You smile wicked, clouded in emptiness. This is a scene you wrote down, once, in the final battle between Zazzerpan and Calmasis.

Still, you think of Becka.

It was harsh, but…it needed to be done.

\--

You spend the rest of spring in silence. You recall the faint memories of your other self to get you through the quiet. It satisfies in a small way, but rings hollower with each time. Every time you (try to) work on CoTL, you stare at the document and then close it. You sleep, work, eat, sleep. Some days you forget to eat. Back in your psychology days you would have called this a case of anhedonia. Now you simply call it regular life.

It doesn’t help that Becka no longer eats at the apartment anymore. You microwave pizzas by the dozen. You miss her. It’s an ache, dull, sure, but it still cuts through the mists of your indifference.

It’s in the middle of May that you see her smoking on the balcony. You’ve never seen her smoke before. She’s even told you she thinks cigarettes are gross.

You open the balcony doors cautiously.

“Becka-?”

“Jesus Christ, what do you want.” She doesn’t say it as a question. She sounds tired and maudlin.

“I just…wanted to say, I’m-”

“What? Fucking sorry?” she drawls. She takes another drag.

“…Yes. I’m sorry.”

She looks at you.

“You’re pining away for someone, aren’t you?”

This is not what you were expecting.

“Excuse me?”

“Come on, Rose. Don’t trick me. You’re waiting for someone to come into your life. Back into your life, I don’t know. You’re, like, obsessed. You don’t even write as much as you used to. I used to have to clear your plot treatments off the table. Now I don’t even get one friggin’ scrap. You’re trapped in a bubble. Fine, maybe something horrible happened. Whatever. But you aren’t _living._ You weren’t when I first met you. Sure, you were writing, but even then you looked a bit like a ghost. At least you used to tell me how much you loved writing. Now, you look like a shadow of yourself. You’ve retreated into some kind of different reality, I know how that looks like. Whenever I look at you, you’re not _here._ ”

You turn away. You tell yourself it doesn’t sting; your knuckles and eyes say different.

“Look, I’m not gonna presume what goes on in your life. I’m not going to say, Hang out with me, Rose, I’ll make you see how wonderful life is! I’m not, a, a…whatdoyoucallem, a manic pixie dream girl. But at least have a life, with or without me. Write. Drink. Get a boyfriend or a girlfriend. Play that violin your mom sent over. Care about something, live, for fuck’s sake; don’t sit around waiting.”

You tell yourself it’s not running away. It’s absconding.

\--

That night, it dawns on you that she’s right. What happened to you? You can’t remember the last time you saw the sun outside of work. You scorn the sun because it means you can’t sleep and get back to remembering a life you’ll never have, whether it’s as the other you or a cherub’s.

You’ve been wasting away, not working on what you love best. What was it Anne Lamott said? _We write because of the spirit. Because of the heart. Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul._

You forsake the laptop for your notebook. You get out one of your lavender pens and begin to write in your journal.

“We’re going to need more wands,” Zazzerpan declares.

It’s not Lovecraftian work, but fine-tuning has always been your better point.

\--

Your next dream is considerably easier. You cut a path through the fog like a blade slicing through paper. You grip your un-mother by the throat. She gurgles and tries to claw at your hands with ivory, delicate fingers, her face twisted exquisitely.

“You and I both know that I am your _only_ mortal agent. I will enact your plans. I thank you for the omnifold vision but _I will run my life as I please_. If not, you will _lose_ me _._ ”

She hisses, “You would give up what we could offer?”

“I’d rather live weak than die greedy.”

She looks at you grimly.

“You will pay, young one. Not by our hand. But another’s.”

“Ask me if I give a fuck. Do we still have an accord?”

She nods, and then proceeds to eat you, her jaw unlocking like a detachable lid. You awaken, slick with sweat. Motherfucking monsters.

\--

You bring her bagels as she’s nursing a hangover on the couch and apologize, tentatively, again and again.

“Just don’t do it again,” she says.

“…you’re really forgiving me that easily?”

“Rose, I almost killed myself when committed. A few heat-of-the-moment remarks isn’t really a big thing when put into perspective. It was still kind of bitchy, though.”

She gives you a sideway look.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

She sighs and crunches on the bagel.

“You’re so crazy.”

You avoid looking at each other’s eyes until she says, “Okay, okay, pot calling the kettle black.”

“Becka, I hope you are aware that you are promoting a racist and unforgivably cliche-”

She puts a pillow over her head. 

“Mrrghhhhhhhhhh. I take it back-you are totally not forgiven.”

You get up and make some coffee, smirking.

\--

You notice it when you’re making your way downtown, walking fast as faces pass you by. As you lean over to get more cake mix for Becka’s birthday, you see it: Betty Crocker Fudge Cake on a podium. There is an entire section dedicated to Betty Crocker products in the supermarket where there was previously on a row of Betty Crocker products. Normally, this would have been disregarded by even the most observant of shoppers, but not you.

That night, you write:

That the cabalistic Predicant Scholar ran was a fact transparent in its selfevidency. His mud-congealed boots trekked the treacherous, abstruse swamps of the Dire Land of Cthulhu’s Massive Groan. He regarded the scraggly weeds and damp bracken with brobdingnagian vexation. He contemplated, stroking his ivory beard with a well-practiced claw, the profligate demise that his student sought after by chasing him.

The end is coming, he thought with abhorrence. His silhouette cut the fog of which millions had dreaded as he vehemently squelched to a safe haven. Why do I fear?

\--

You are there the day Crockercorp launches its first product: the Tiaratop. The eldritch mothers hiss into your ear of its treachery, and bring down on your eyes promise of more. OBEY GO TO SLEEP CEASE REPRODUCTION you CULLING IS MANDATORY tell ALL HAIL THE EMPRESS Becka SUBMIT TO HIVE CHECKS that the iPhone 6 looks better.

There is a snarl around your mouth when you say it to her, facing the coffee pot so she can’t see. You unhinge your dark tongue, hiding somewhere in your brain. You think: _Message received._

\--

You spend nights lingering over champagne, over fruitless documents and crumpled papers. Getting back into the game proves difficult, but you slog on. Each night the city grips you like a shock zap. It is yours, for only this short time, and your heart aches with the knowledge that you love it like no other. It will drown long before your love for it dies.

You smoke, play Handel on your violin and pace the balcony on nights that writing cover letters become too much. Sometimes you think that this series will never take off, that working at a publishing company has done nothing, until it finally, mercifully does. Every rejection letter you get, you scrutinize. Then you take your laptop and go over it all again. Sometimes you get the temptation to look into the future and see if you become a success. While you do possess VISION OMNIFOLD, though, you’re a little too genre-savvy to do a That’s So Raven causal loop. Some things should remain a mystery.

You are twenty three when an agent finally says to come to his office and bring your manuscript. He takes it and skims it. He asks if you have money for a professional editor, and you say no. He asks if you have proofread/edited it all yourself. You nod.

He’s middle-aged, with black bags around his eyes to match yours. He looks weary and offbeat; says gruffly, “It’s a start, I s’pose. Madam Lalonde, was it? We have a lot of work to do.”

He takes you through each word of your first book until you’ve near memorized it. You tweak and poke and prod and polish, until your book becomes more of a doorstopper than a bookshelf. After six months he says, “Alright. Let’s see what the boys upstairs think.” He sells it to publishing houses all over the city. One finally accepts. The advance is miserable, what authors call “kiss-off money” in the industry. You don’t tell anyone what it is, and proceed to say yes to it. By the end of the decade, you would have made at least a thousand times that amount.

He signs you up for the first book of the Complacency of the Learned, and at first sales are horrible. Reviews pour in that describe it as trite and self-indulgent. Becka does nothing but promote it to all her friends at the travel agency, the book store and the theatre(Becka has three part-time jobs and probably earns more in a month than you did in three). At a signing which only ten people show up, a guy with a nose piercing asks you what it’s really about.

“It’s about the Salem witch trials,” you deadpan, acting perfectly serious.

You deliver different answers to various people, as some newspaper critics begin to warm to your book.

“The eventual apocalypse that will descend upon us in 2015. Calmasis is the metaphorical representation of zombies.”

“The economic climate.”

“Gender roles.”

“Political rebellion in Third World countries.”

“The death of the Twinkie and the ascent of its knockoffs.”

“Sexual longing and its suppression.” (That one earns you tons of wizard fanfictions. You are suitably impressed. You have already pre-ordered a Calmasis body pillow off Amazon to be delivered to one Betty Crocker.)

The Internet catches on quickly to this pattern and soon everyone is interested. Androgynous wizards? They pluck apart the book for detail after detail, peeling it apart like a tangerine.

It’s when Terry Pratchett praises it that sales begin to skyrocket. Fans of Discworld abound and flock to the forums with increasing fervour. Suddenly, you see your name reflected on every bookshop glass display. Signings increase in number and you have to use the fire escape instead of your front door when someone on 4chan leaks your address. The paparazzi come knocking, but you employ your powers to make sure none of them get a single good shot of you. This only pours fuel on the flames of your fame.

Soon it becomes a media-wide chase to get you on film. You provide interviews, of course, but they only ever get to print your words. The pictures or videos turn out to be deleted, or completely black. It adds to the intrigue and soon every newspaper is stumbling over each other for a written interview. Being an agent of the horrorterrors has its perks.

Becka’s barraged with harassing fans at work, and eventually, you get rich enough to buy the entire bookstore so that she can linger in the backrooms reading erotic Victorian porn and boss around her own interns. She gives up her other jobs but keeps the boyfriend she got from the travel agency. 

"Thank you, thank you, thank you," she says to you Christmas morning. "Running around from place to place was getting old. I was even going to take up a fourth job to clear up all the student debt."

“You worked yourself to the ground on weekdays, Becka. Think of it as a Christmas present,” you tell her, when you present her the official paperwork and key.

It all comes too quickly. It seems only yesterday you were still putting wizard hats on frogs in your backyard. Now, you have plans; big meetings, tours and hundreds of signings. You’ve already signed up for five more books in the series and you have plans to increase your fortune, if only to make the Empress twitch on her throne when she comes to power. The date 11/11/11 burns crimson in your mind.

You contemplate this at a benefit gig. It’s all fancy lights, champagne and chandeliers. Normally, that would be “right up your alley”. But the cool-hearted, enigmatic pretense you usually affix over your face for the public seems too crumpled and used for tonight. You look down at New York. It’s a cycle of light, cars being jettisoned from the bowels of car parks and the constant lingering smell of cigarette smoke. Your vision follows a maze of yellow windows. You look skyward. The stars are still there, shivering in the cool blue.

You’ve sent out your beacon. Disguised in wizardry and murder-nonetheless, those who choose to defy the Crocker bitch will recognize your signal. You’ve seen it in your mind’s eye; the revolution will be devised.

Very quietly, you count to four.

The balcony doors open. You smile a knowing smile.

“Hey, Rose Lalonde, right?” an all-too-familiar, yet alien, voice says behind you.

You turn.

“Hello,” you say. 

“Harmon sent me over; says we’d get along. Don’t know about you, but I’m thinkin’ he’s had a bit too much of the special punch.”

“The best of us tend to have our lapses,” you reply. “So who would you be?”

“You haven’t heard of me already?” he gives you a truly douchetastic smirk. “Get out a pen, babe, because my name is going to go down the annals of history. Fuck that shit right in the textbooks and mark this day down as the first day of the rest of your life.”

You laugh. How unknowingly ironic. He quirks an eyebrow.

He sticks out a hand for you to shake.

“I’d be Dave. Dave Strider.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [dormez-vous, mon coeur? (the cock-crow remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/723628) by [dashery](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dashery/pseuds/dashery)




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